The Augur Prediction platform is finally live after 2 years in development. The Beta version of the platform has been available for almost a year now. Augur was initially built on the Ethereum platform and its ICO managed to raise $5 Million back in 2015 when crypto and ICOs were not as common as they are right now.

The new Augur Prediction protocol is still on the Ethereum platform but on a new smart contract different from the previous one. The announcement of the release was made by the team at Augur via medium.com and they had this to say about the launch:

The REP migration has been successfully completed. New production REP has been minted to all 56,338 unique accounts that held REP at the time of 11:01AM PT on July 9th, 2018.

The team at Augur also provided the transaction that froze the old REP contract indefinitely. The transaction can be found on Etherscan.

Binance, has also announced that they have finished deploying the updated smart contract address on the Ethereum Mainnet. The team at Binance has also notified its users that it has resumed deposits and withdrawal of the REP token on the exchange.

However, the market response to the release of the final version of the platform cannot be gauged with the entire crypto market in the red. The total market capitalization has dropped from $273 Billion to current levels of $254 Billion. BTC has also dropped 6% in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $6,400. REP has consequently been affected by the market decline and is currently trading at $31.45 and down 8% in the last 24 hours.

What exactly is Augur?

Augur is an open-source platform available on Github that allows users to create and make bets on anything from elections, sports, even weather. What distinguishes Augur from the traditional betting markets is that no single entity controls the bets. The project’s whitepaper states that any user can create a market about any event and any user can participate in any open market on the platform.

A community member has already created a website called Prediction.Global which allows users to view the current markets on the Augur platform.

The 2 year delay has allowed the team at Augur to test their code to avoid any issues. There is also a bug bounty program worth $200,000 for any critical bugs that any developer finds on its platform.